Improve Your Brand’s User Experience through Personalisation

The word ‘personalisation’ goes hand in hand with the term ‘luxury’. Retail premium brands are aiming to offer a customised service throughout the entire customer journey offering an excellent in-store customised service where clients feel that ‘unique’ personal touch that only premium brands deliver.

The challenge facing luxury brands today is to replicate that personal experience in the online world so that it fits seamlessly into the overall brand strategy. It is important to note, the level of personalisation will be dependant on how strong is the relationship with the existing customer. The more developed is the relationship, the more personalised the content can be.

Personalisation in an era of privacy concerns

Ultimately, personalisation depends on data. In the real world, in-store human staff will interact with the customer and use this interaction to inform their decisions on how best to assist them. Online, website analytics can track customer behaviour and personal preferences, plus brands can ask the user to provide them with additional data in order to provide those unique personal recommendations.

Over recent years, many customers have become increasingly aware of the need to exercise caution when it comes to handing over their data to anyone. Luxury brands, however, have a massive advantage in this regard in that they are likely to be perceived as (much) more trustworthy than high-street brands due to the sense of community they create around their brand.

As the following graph from the Econsultancy’s 2017 CRO Report outlines, 94% of companies experience an uplift in conversion rates by using website personalisation.

Differentiate behavioural vs marketing personalisation

While both of them aim to improve your website’s conversion, behavioural personalisation mainly focuses on providing a better user experience through navigation. The goal of doing this is to make your customer feel comfortable navigating your site, staying longer and becoming more loyal to your brand.

Marketing personalisation, on the other hand, has particular KPI’s as the end goal. Some examples could be pop-in banners, countdown clocks, collecting email addresses or specific survey requests. They are ultimately aimed and short-term campaign goals.

Keep KPIs under control

There are all sorts of key performance indicators you can track, however that doesn’t mean you should be measuring all as only some of them will be relevant to your commercial strategy (and for your customer too).

In fact, asking for unnecessary data can have a counterproductive effect. Focus on what matters most to your customer and remember that the easiest way to find that out is usually to ask them. Again, luxury brands have two significant advantages over their mainstream counterparts here. The first is the matter of trust. When a luxury brand says “please help us to improve our service”, it has much more credibility than the same request from ‘big box brands’. It is also recommendable to offer of a reward for completing a survey or any other sort of action done by the customer as this will help to make the customer complete that action and also feel positive about it.

An example of a premium brand gathering additional data is The Outnet who gives its customers the option to give sizing and preference details in advance to receive more customised email newsletters:

Remember online and real-world should move in tandem

Empowering in-store staff to be proactive with customers is one of the best ways to achieve brand loyalty (in fact that can be one of the major differentiators between luxury brands and other brands) and doing so online can be equally beneficial. Brands should find a way to accurately track that data to offer personal ‘shopping-assistant style’ recommendations when browsing online. Having brick and mortar stores and your online presence competing against each other is not a good strategy and both should have a cohesion.

If you would like to learn more on how to personalise your digital strategy, please get in touch.